


married by the ocean

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Fisherman!Flint, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 08:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10081331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Flint returns to the sea whence he came, and James? Well, James goes back to Padstow.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A while back, Jess candlewinds came up with this absolutely brilliant [fisherman!Flint idea](http://candlewinds.tumblr.com/tagged/fisherman-flint), and I always wanted to write it except I am utterly incapable of writing modern AUs. Then I started thinking: it doesn't _have_ to be a modern AU, right? So here it is. The vaguely canon-compliant post-series fisherman!Flint fic. Enjoy!
> 
> Title from 'Tethered' by Sleeping At Last.

He’d wanted to walk away from the sea, but there he was, climbing into his little fishing boat every morning at dawn and rowing out into the expanse of open water.

He’d come back in the evening with his humble haul, and he’d cook, fish sizzling and the skin crisping up in the pan of shallow oil he held over the fire, and he’d serve it with carrots and potatoes, roughly chopped up and boiled. Or he’d make fish stew, or fish pie, or fish soup. When he had eaten, he would sit by the window in the waning light and read until the words blurred together.

Sometimes he’d be too numb with cold and too exhausted to eat, and he’d stumble home from the harbour and head straight to bed, drawing the quilt up over his head.

Some nights he was woken by the shouts of the Huer spotting some glittering shoal of pilchards under the moonlight. It was not a call he heeded but it woke him nonetheless; it was impossible to sleep through that racket. ‘Heva, heva!’ the Huer cried from his lookout on the cliff, and fishermen leapt out of bed in response, getting the seine boats out to sea. It was a lucrative business, seining for pilchards. It was the business his grandfather had been in.

But it was not his business. He kept his distance from the other fishers. He only wanted to eat, and sleep, and read, and be left alone. The Huer’s trumpeting would fade, and he would fall back asleep.

Some nights he was woken by his own nightmares. It was harder to go back to sleep after those.

In the mornings, when he was unmooring his modest vessel, loosening the knots effortlessly without looking, he’d stare at the ships in the harbour, their sails still shyly furled, and wonder where they might be heading that day.

It would be a simple thing, to get on one of those ships. He knew that often there would be one that would get him where he wanted to go.

But he only untied his boat and rowed out to sea, and cast his nets, day after day, while the gulls circled and squawked overhead.

* * *

Padstow was mostly as he remembered it from childhood. The buildings seemed smaller though, the streets narrower. It was quiet and grey compared to the riot of sound and colour that was Nassau, but on sunlit days the sea was almost as beautiful as it was in the Bahamas.

His cottage was at the end of a street, at the edge of town. Whitewashed walls of cob and a thatched roof. Sparse furnishing of dark wood: a table, a bookshelf, two chairs. There was a room with a bed too large for him, and little else.

A family of five lived next door. The father mined copper. The mother bought fish from James on most days, pressing a few coins into his palm as he tossed a handful of glistening fish into her basket.

It was a good enough life. It was a good enough life, he repeated to himself every morning as his eyes blinked open and he summoned the will to get out of bed.

He’d sworn never to set foot in England again, years ago, curled up in bed next to Miranda while she was telling a story about some lavish ball she’d attended in London, more to herself than to him, as if she was reminding herself that she had lived, once. She had broken off in the middle of the story and asked him, “Don’t you ever wish to go back?”

“Where to? London?” he’d mumbled, half asleep already.

“Home,” she’d replied.

“This _is_ my home,” he’d said, even if he didn’t feel it. “England doesn’t want men like me. I wouldn’t go back, not even if she begged on her knees to have me back. And she won’t.” His throat had felt raw as it always did when he was acknowledging the fact of his love for Thomas, no matter how obliquely. “She wants men like me to be corpses and ghosts, and if we refuse to be that, then we must be monsters. She’ll never have me back, and I’ll never go back.”

Yet there he was. In England. Under the drizzle of its pale sky once more.

Some days, when he was out at sea, the waves lapped at his boat and crooned to him, more lullaby than siren song. He wanted to drop his oars and lie down on the hard, damp wood, fall asleep and never wake up.

He’d gaze at the ships sailing northeast along the coastline. To the Bristol channel. And he’d close his heavy, heavy eyes, just for a moment.

At night, dreams were always an unavoidable lottery of chance. Sometimes he dreamt of hands slick with blood, the thud of heads hitting ground, knife-sharp screams and lives so quickly extinguished. Sometimes he dreamt of sand-gold hair and warm smiles, books bound in red leather and love notes written in a swirling script. Sometimes these dreams ran together in a horrific fusion, all that life dissolving into all that death.

One night, he dreamt of wild dark curls that streamed in the wind, and all of the next day, he was even more unsettled than usual, something straining under his skin like canvas billowing in a gust, swelling full, his whole body whipped by the force of that longing. That evening as he came back into the harbour, he watched the crates of copper ore being loaded onto the ship that would sail in the morning for Bristol to deliver its cargo to the smelters there. He thought of buying passage for himself on that ship, but as always, he buried that thought.

In his dream, the man with the dark hair had grasped his hand and asked him, “Why don’t you come _home_ , James?”

He hadn’t understood. He was home, wasn’t he? This was where he had grown up. This was where the vicar, an extraordinarily kind man, had taught him, and a gaggle of boys more reluctant and impatient than him, to read Latin and Koine Greek. This was where he had devoured his first books in the family shopfront, looking up with a nervous smile whenever a customer came in, while his father had sawed and hammered in the workshop at the back. This was where he had raced down to the harbour along with all the grown men every time he heard the Huer cry at the sighting of a shoal, his tiny boots pattering on the stone pier, a child caught up in all the excitement.

Where else could he go on earth that might come closer to home than this, now that Nassau was lost?

He looked at the labourers heaving the crates aboard the ship.

He looked away.

* * *

He walked back to his cottage, a basket of fish in one arm and a basket of fresh vegetables from the market in the other. He placed the baskets on his table and set about lighting the fire at the hearth.

That was when he heard the unmistakable lurching rhythm that haunted his thoughts, like the scant melody of a childhood song whose lyrics had been forgotten. His heart jolted unevenly, as if synchronising itself instinctively with that rhythm. The dull clang of wood on wood. A hollow, arcing moment like the silent, killing swoop of a bird. Then the thick thump of a boot hitting ground.

He spun round, and saw John Silver emerging from his bedroom, and everything inside him teetered as if he was the one without a leg and Silver had just laid hands on his chest and shoved. But Silver hadn’t touched him. Silver was still further than an arm’s length away.

But Christ, Silver was so close. So _close_.

“Flint,” Silver said. It was strange, seeing Silver’s face so clean. Whenever he thought of Silver’s face, he thought of it grimy with dirt, shining with sweat, sticky with blood. He thought of it the way it had looked in the most desperate moments they had ever shared together, etched with pain or hunger or rage, troubled, frantic, confused.

Not like this. Calm. Unblemished. Beard and moustache kept well-trimmed. Hair glossy and tamed. The face of a man living a good life.

The rest of him made no sense, either. He was wearing a cravat, and a dark red waistcoat, and breeches.

James swallowed. “That’s not my name.”

Silver frowned, then smiled, gesturing with one broad palm. “I was referring to the thing that you’re holding.” 

James rolled his eyes and let the tinderbox clatter from his hand onto the table. It was a mistake, since once he wasn’t holding anything his hands began to feel restless, and he no longer wore any rings that he could fiddle with. He realised with a start that he hadn’t felt the need to fidget in months, and now it was all wrong, him just anxiously kneading the bare knuckles of his hand between his thumb and forefinger. “How did you find me?”

“You told me about Padstow once, do you remember?”

James nodded slowly. One of those days on the Maroon Island, he’d sat on the shore watching men go out in their boats to fish, and he’d told Silver about his grandfather. Once the first hurdle had been overcome, after that night in the forest when Thomas’ name had passed his lips and touched Silver’s ears, his past slipped out easily around Silver, like water from a leaky barrel, as if he had sensed the empty gap of Silver’s past, the cool shadowy abyss of it that Silver pretended didn’t exist, and he wanted to fill it with his own stories, to illuminate it with the warmth and light of his own memories.

“Joji wrote to me that you sailed for England when you didn’t find Thomas,” Silver said.

“He _wrote_ to you,” James said, ignoring the way his blood rushed in his ears to hear Silver remind him of what happened in Savannah.

“Yes, he did,” Silver said. “And no, I didn’t know he could write, either. Anyway, you didn’t show up in Bristol. So I came looking for you. It was the first logical place to look. The only places in England I’ve heard you talk of are London and Padstow. A sprawling giant of a city and a small scenic fishing port. I think you’d have started looking in Padstow first, too.”

“I’ve been here for months.”

“I know,” Silver said, drawing out a chair and sitting down on it, leaning his crutch against the table. “Don’t you miss how fucking hot it was in the West Indies? It’s goddamn miserable out there.”

James glanced out the window. It wasn’t even raining today. “Well, you found me,” he said. “What do you want?”

“What are you doing here, Flint?” Silver asked, and something jumped in James’ jaw. He clenched it down.

“I’m living.”

Silver tilted his head as if to question the veracity of that statement, and James’ hands itched; his body felt too light, not weighed down with a sword and a pistol at his hip. He didn’t feel safe, and his heart pounded in his chest.

“You can live in a lot of places in the world where they don’t know who you are,” Silver said. “Why did you even come back to England?”

“It was the first place I could think of,” James said. Which wasn’t really a lie, but it wasn’t much of the truth, either. “I didn’t put much thought into it.”

* * *

In the middle of the night he became vaguely aware of the way the moonbeams from the window fell across him, the white unearthly light piercing through his dreams, and then for what felt like hours he was pinned halfway between sleep and waking. It felt like he was struggling to swim upstream in a sweeping river of sorrow that kept threatening to pull him under.

This was a thing that happened to him sometimes. He didn’t understand it, but it just happened. He choked on it, the infinite and overwhelming current of it. He was not fully awake, or he would have got out of bed, lit a lamp, read a book—anything to shake himself from this state. But he was not _asleep_ , either. He was not dreaming. He was just… _feeling_.

He had always been a man of intense emotion. He knew this about himself. But what happened to him sometimes in these lonely hours before dawn was like all the sadness he had ever felt, distilled and purified, until it turned into something like liquid mercury, holding down all his sluggish limbs. He felt like he ought to be crying, but there was nothing real or physical about what was happening to him. It existed in another realm of being, on a higher, merely mental plane.

When dawn came, he finally wrenched himself from it. He felt worn through, like a fraying thread. He put on his grey woollen shirt and his breeches. He made himself some porridge and sat down to eat it, and then there was a knock at his front door.

It was Silver, who had spent the night at an inn in town. “I have to say, the service isn’t quite as good as at my own tavern,” Silver said as the wind blew him into James’ cottage and James shut the door. “But they charge only half the rates I do, so I suppose you get what you pay for.”

Part of James wanted to respond, but his tongue was a pack animal bowed under a great burden, and he could not speak. He ladled porridge into another bowl and set it down in front of Silver, who protested that he had already had some lovely pilchards for breakfast at the inn. James wrinkled his mouth in distaste, having eaten one too many pilchards in his youth to ever attach the word ‘lovely’ to them. He really preferred other fish.

Silver ate the porridge anyway, polishing it all off until his bowl was spotless.

He seemed undeterred by the fact that James wouldn’t say anything. “I don’t believe my cooking skills are as good as Mr Harris’ at the inn, though,” he said. “My wife thinks I should hire a better cook.”

James froze, only for a second, while he was carrying his and Silver’s bowl to the bucket of water he kept for washing dishes.

Silver was a _husband_.

James scrubbed the bowls with a rag and rinsed them. He wanted to ask how Madi was, but his throat was still closed tight, a stoppered jar. He wondered if she still wore the clothes of her people, or if she looked like a proper English wife to match her proper English husband.

He looked at Silver, and then he grabbed his black wool coat from the hook by the door, and left the house.

* * *

Silver followed him. Silver followed him to the harbour, and into the boat, and rowed with him. James’ eyes kept flickering to Silver’s hand gripped around the oar, at the solitary ring that glinted on his finger, and he wondered how he had not seen it till now.

It was a clear day. The water glowed under the sun, and something began to crumble within him as they rowed, the steady motions sanding away the ponderous weight that took up all the space inside the desolate cavity of his ribs. He found himself wishing for the bump of sharks against the hull of the boat, remembering the delirious euphoria of hurling a harpoon from a quivering, feather-weak arm and seeing it strike grey flesh.

Silver, on the other hand, was squinting back towards the shoreline, admiring the rugged cliffs. “I don’t know the Cornish coast very well,” he said. “That’s Newquay down south that way, is it? Those beaches over there could very well rival the ones in the Bahamas.”

James still couldn’t speak, but by the time they rowed back hours later, Silver had conjured a misshapen geography of Cornwall all by himself, and James knew the names of every single person who had stayed in Silver’s tavern for the past month, and some of his sadness had evanesced into the sea air. He trudged back to his cottage with Silver, and made soup, and Silver wolfed it all down and said, “I’d pay you to cook at my tavern, you know.”

James raised his brow.

Silver continued, “Honestly, I think Madi is at her wit’s end. She keeps suggesting some suitable candidates, but I don’t like any of them. ‘What’s wrong with Mr Lloyd?’ she asks me. ‘I don’t know, he just looks a bit shifty to me,’ I say, and she throws her hands up in the air, practically yells at me: ‘He’s a perfectly good cook, and _you_ look shifty to everyone!’”

James chewed his bottom lip.

“You could come, and we’d keep a room for you,” Silver said. “Then I wouldn’t have to cook anymore, and it would be a relief to us all. Madi especially. Actually, come to think of it, I hope she hasn’t just hired someone in my absence without my approval. I’ll go back and Mr Lloyd will be in my kitchen, stealing my spatulas.”

James’s lips twitched, and Silver smiled at him. He got up, hopping over to the bookshelf and ran his fingers along the titles. “We’ll let you have a bookshelf in your room, of course,” he said. “As long as you give me some recommendations. I want to get a gift for Madi, but I don’t know books as well as you or she does.”

James got up too, stood at Silver’s back, thinking about how the burgundy of Silver’s waistcoat made his dark hair look all the more beautiful.

“I should go,” Silver said. “I’ll be leaving on the ship to Bristol in the morning.”

James wanted to beg him to stay, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t open his mouth, couldn’t unstopper the jar of his throat, couldn’t let all that longing spill out from his ribcage. He only touched Silver’s hand where it lay on the spine of the _Meditations_ , a book which James had somehow managed to preserve through everything.

Silver turned to look at him, as his fingertip traced the thin metal band around Silver’s ring finger. Silver said, “Miss wearing rings, do you?”

He did miss wearing rings.

“We could get you one,” Silver said, holding his gaze, and James’ heart was a stone skipping across the shimmering blue water of Silver’s eyes. “If you come cook for us. We’ll pay your first month’s wages with a ring just like this one.” He circled James’ ring finger with his own fingers, and then he angled his face up and pressed his lips against James’.

It was if James had been staring at the blank page at the end of a book for months, and now Silver was flipping back through all the pages of the book for him. The kiss was soft like the shivery whisper of hundreds of pages skimming over a thumb. He was finally back at the beginning of it, all its contents laid out before him, all the words and stories and possibilities about to unfold anew.

He sighed into the kiss, and then Silver was tugging on his hand. Silver led him into the bedroom, and he thought about pointing out how ridiculous that was—it was _his_ bedroom, not Silver’s. But then he just laid down on the bed, and Silver laid down next to him, and ran his hands through James’ hair.

“I’m glad to see you’re growing your hair back,” Silver said. He nuzzled James’ beard, kissing James’ chin. He grasped James’ undershirt at the waist, pulling its hem out of the confines of James’ breeches, and then his hands were sliding up Flint’s sides. “God, you’re so warm under those shirts.” He rubbed his cheek against the breast of James’ overshirt, the soft slate grey flannel. His fingers smoothed up over the column of James’ spine.

James thought Silver’s hands were even warmer.

His own hands unbuttoned Silver’s waistcoat, untied Silver’s cravat. He almost cried when he did it, because it had been over a decade since he had last untucked someone’s cravat from a shirtfront. He revealed the sweet golden stretch of Silver’s neck, and his fingers stroked the skin there reverently. Something that had once been so visible and open was now a secret treasure, and it thrilled James as much as it grieved him. Such were the precious, awful contradictions of life.

They held each other, hands tenderly exploring, and then James said, hoarsely, “Thank you.” 

The heat of their embrace had finally melted away the wax seal that had kept James’ throat from uttering a sound all day. He still saw everything through a faint veil of melancholy, which could not be cast aside, but Silver was present and real, the most vivid thing in his life.

“ _There_ you are,” Silver murmured, delight in his voice like a spoonful of sugar stirred into tea. Silver kissed James below his ear, where the red fuzz of his beard began at the top of his jawline. “I was thinking of that night in the cage on the Maroon Island. When I was trying to persuade you not to sacrifice yourself for the crew. I’m always thinking about that night. I sat down next to you, and you didn’t say anything. You just let me talk, and I talked, and talked, and then I got up and left you alone, and it was only then I realised that you hadn’t spoken a single word to me the entire time.”

James blinked. _I’m always thinking about that night._ He didn’t realise that Silver thought of it as often as he did. When he thought of that night, what persisted in his memory was the white gleam of Silver’s gaunt face in the torchlight, the wide concern in Silver’s eyes that was half fear, half love, even if they both didn’t quite know that yet at the time.

“I don’t mind, you know,” Silver said, his fingers drawing unknowable patterns on the bare skin of James’ chest. “Wherever you go when you are unable to speak. God knows I talk plenty for two people.”

James kissed him in gratitude. He would attempt to describe it another time, the way the gears of his mind sometimes ground to a merciless halt and rendered him a solid and mute block of despair rather than a human being, but there were other things he wanted to explain right now. “When I didn’t find Thomas in Savannah,” he said, “I was so very close to giving up. What did I have left? Nassau was hopeless. Thomas was still dead. You were gone. I sat there nursing my bottle of rum, but then all I could think was that you were gone, but you weren’t _gone_. You were still out there, in the world. I could find you again if I wanted. And that was what dragged me out of that place. The thought of you. It was as if I heard you calling my name from the other side of the world. ‘James’, you said. ‘James, don’t you fucking die.’ Like you were pulling me out of the water, hauling me onto a beach. Saving me from drowning.”

Silver huffed. “And then you never even came to see me.”

“I got to Padstow,” James said. “And it felt so comfortable and familiar in that moment that I ended up staying. As long as you were just a possibility, then that possibility motivated me to keep going, just for another day. And another, and another. But it terrified me, every time I thought about making that possibility a reality. Any number of things could go wrong, then.”

“You fucking idiot,” Silver said, and James chuckled helplessly, tears welling at the corners of his eyes.

“Why didn’t you come for me sooner, if you knew I might be here?” he asked.

“When I read Joji’s letter, it gave me hope that I might see you turn up in my tavern in Bristol. But you never did, and I thought. Maybe you didn’t want to. If you were in England, surely it would have been a simple matter for you to come to me, if you wanted to see me. You never came, and so I believed perhaps you didn’t want to see me. Perhaps you were making a good life for yourself and you didn’t need a former pirate king to come and disrupt it.”

“Then why _did_ you come?” 

“Maybe you didn’t need me anymore, but I still needed you,” Silver said. “Even if it was to be for the last time, I needed to see you. Needed to confirm with my own eyes that you were alive and well, that you hadn’t drunk yourself to death in Savannah, as I made everyone else believe that you had.” His fingers drifted along the length of James’ arm, and then he grinned, the brightness of his teeth peeking through between the dark bristles of his moustache and beard, just like the sudden flash of a shoal of pilchards in the sea. “Also, my wife got really fucking tired of me wondering out loud whether I should come and find you, so she manhandled me onto a ship herself.”

James kissed the knuckle of Silver’s ring finger. “I take it she knows what you intended to do once you found me,” he said.

“She does,” Silver said. He caressed the shell of James’ ear, and James shivered. “Come cook for us in Bristol, James.”

That was the first time he had ever heard Silver call him by that name, outside of his own imagination. It made his mind clink with sparkling joy, like a newly-minted coin. He wanted to climb into Silver’s pocket and live there forever.

So of course he said yes. But he would not go with Silver tomorrow morning, not yet. He wanted a little more time here in Cornwall, on his own, to say goodbye to his past.

* * *

The next morning, Silver left on the ship to Bristol. It was another sunny day. James took a break from fishing and hiked up to the town cemetery, where he stood before his family plot, the names of his grandparents and his parents carved in the stone. He left flowers there.

When he came out from the graveyard, he walked along the sloping path to Tregirls Cove, and sat on the sand with a picnic of bread and cheese and pickled herring. Neither Thomas nor Miranda had a grave. But if he could have chosen a resting place for them both, it would be here, one of the most peaceful places he had ever known. The beach was empty. There was only the distant shriek of gulls and the mildest of breezes, the shape of the land shielding it from most of the wind. You could see the other side of the estuary, the lush green fields there; it wasn’t as stark and barren as a view of the open sea could sometimes be. The sand was velvet soft and the shade of Thomas’ hair. The sea was as exuberantly emerald as Miranda’s favourite dress.

And Thomas always remarked that the colour of James’ eyes made him long for the seaside.

He closed his eyes and lay his head down on his picnic blanket, and he dozed. When he woke up, he made his way back to town, and he made dinner and went to bed. He fully intended to get on the next ship to Bristol.

But then when he surfaced from sleep a whole day since Silver’s departure, it became quite difficult to convince himself that it hadn’t all been some hallucination, an elaborate fantasy. It rained all day, and then again the next; they were only light showers, which did not prevent him from going fishing, but his mood plummeted. The sky cleared for a few days, but then it stormed for a whole week.

Even when the sun finally reappeared and the sea stopped churning, he couldn’t make himself go anywhere except back into his little fishing boat, rowing out to sea again.

He couldn’t trust his mind. He must have dreamt Silver being here. It was too good to be true.

He told himself that day after day, as the warmth of Silver’s skin gradually faded from his memory. The weeks passed, and then he came back to his cottage one evening to find not just Silver, but Madi, the two of them occupying the only chairs he had.

He reeled back, still in the doorway. Madi was wearing a lavender linen dress, a little like the dresses Miranda used to wear on New Providence. It was inconspicuous and plain. But Madi herself was never going to be inconspicuous. The very air around her buzzed as if it would combust any moment from the sheer power of her presence. James resisted the urge to kneel, especially when she levelled her annoyed gaze at him.

“Flint, _why_ did you promise my husband you were coming to Bristol if it was not in fact your intention to follow through with your promise?” she asked, frustration whetting the blade of her voice.

Silver’s eyes were distraught, his brow furrowed, and James was profoundly shaken by the thought that he had given Silver reason to look this upset again. 

“I’m sorry,” James said. He put down his basket on the floor and kicked the door shut behind him. “Once you left, I was prepared to go on the next ship. But then it all seemed like a dream. I couldn’t believe that I would be allowed to be that happy, to have whatever you were offering me. I couldn’t…” His hands felt like they were engaged in some complicated dance that he couldn’t cease, his fingers spasming awkwardly.

Madi rose from her chair. “Flint,” she said, and then she exchanged a look with her husband. “ _James_.” She approached him and took hold of both of his hands. “My husband is an idiot. If I had gone in his place I would have personally dragged you onto the ship to make sure you came with me. But now look what you have made us do. We have both had to come to retrieve you. Do you believe now that we are sincere and genuine, and not merely figments?” Her countenance was one of exasperation, yes, but it was fond, too, and her hands were firm but gentle around his wrists, and James was too stunned by her kindness to respond straightaway.

“Guess who we have had to leave in charge of the tavern?” Silver asked, and carried on without waiting for a reply, “That’s right. Bloody Mr Lloyd, the shifty-looking bastard. If when we get back it turns out he’s stolen all our funds, I’m going to have go all the way back to the fucking Bahamas to dig up that fucking cache.”

Madi turned and looked at Silver. “I don’t know what you have against Mr Lloyd. He’s a trustworthy man. Eminently more trustworthy than James here, who has given you his word that he would come to Bristol but whose word has proven false. I still think we should hire Mr Lloyd as the cook.” She turned back and winked at James; he recognised the teasing lilt in her voice, and he flushed all over.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” Silver said, throwing his hands up in mock resignation. “Guess that’s that off the table then, James. Off we go back to Bristol to pay Mr Lloyd his new wages.”

“Is it—” James cleared his throat, his hands trembling even as Madi still gripped his wrists. He saw the twinkling silver ring around her finger, felt the hard metal of it on the ridge of his wristbone. “That is, is he getting paid with a ring his first month, too?”

“What do you think, Madi?” Silver asked, as if deliberating. “Is he?” He got up, loping towards them both, until he stood next to Madi.

“Mr Lloyd already has a wedding ring,” Madi said. “I should not think he would require another one.”

“You’re right,” Silver said, taking out something from his pocket. “Pity I already got another one, then.” He spread his palm open, and the third ring lay there.

Madi let go of James’ hands, her hands squeezing the nape of his neck instead as she leaned forward to kiss his cheek, and she whispered in his ear, “Be good to him.”

She stepped back, letting Silver stand in front of James. Silver clutched James’ left hand, steadying it and slipping the slim metal ring onto his finger. “ _Now_ will you come cook for us in Bristol, seeing as I’ve already given you one month’s payment in advance?”

James smiled, and he was about to say yes, when a sudden resounding shout boomed outside, a trumpeted call blasting through the town: “Heva, heva!” 

“What the _fuck_ is that?” Silver asked, nearly falling backwards from shock. James wrapped his arms tight around Silver and kissed him. He glanced at Madi, who looked equally baffled and alarmed, and he grinned so hard the muscles in his face began to ache.

“That,” he said, feeling the old childhood exhilaration at hearing the Huer’s cry bubbling up in him, “is the sound of someone who has just sighted a great fortune.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are much appreciated! <3 Come find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com) where I am tensely waiting for the second half of S4 to destroy me.
> 
> Also, check out this [gorgeous edit](http://jamesemcgraw.tumblr.com/post/162763170197/married-by-the-ocean-by-reluming-one-night-he) made by María!


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